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Meeting of the Parliament 15 March 2012

15 Mar 2012 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Offenders (Rehabilitation)

McLetchie, David Con Lothian Watch on SPTV

This has been an interesting and useful debate with some excellent contributions. I thank Lewis Macdonald for pointing out that the social impact bond model was conceived by his Government and is now being implemented by mine. It is only fair that credit is given where it is due and that we acknowledge the cross-party interest in the use of the tool as a weapon to tackle a problem that is of concern to us all.

I was impressed by what Mary Fee said about the impact of prison on children and families and the need to address some of the problems that arise in that context if we are to break the cycle that she described. There was a great deal of truth in what she said. It was also instructive to hear from her of the international examples of ways of dealing with that particular problem.

Graeme Pearson was right to highlight the problem of tackling the poor literacy and numeracy levels among prisoners. There is far too much inactivity in our prisons. There needs to be more purposeful direction. There is no shortage of time to devote to tackling the underlying educational deficiencies; what there seems to be a shortage of are the necessary programmes. That needs to be addressed. We need to be able to lever in additional funding to support programmes of that nature. A social impact bond may be the sort of project that can be of benefit to us in helping to tackle that fundamental problem. If that problem is not tackled, there will be no rehabilitation of people once they are out of prison and back in society.

From the discussion, we have seen that investment in social impact bonds can fund the role that voluntary organisations and social enterprises can play in rehabilitation. It is a form of venture capitalism, as it were, with an added social purpose. Depending on how the programmes perform against set targets, Government can pay out to investors on the basis of the economic value to the Government and the taxpayer of the progress that has been made.

Roderick Campbell gave us some additional information and highlighted some fair warnings about how one might assess the value and outcomes of the Peterborough project. He was right to do that because a multitude of factors are involved, and sometimes results can be skewed by factors that are not directly related to the programme, such as the fact that participation is voluntary. On the other hand, I think that the initiative is worth trying. That was the message that came out of today’s debate. There is no magic bullet, but we must try to do something, because we believe in the value of redemption and of turning people’s lives around, as I said in my opening speech. We might be frustrated and sometimes disappointed at the outcome, but that is no reason to write ideas off or to write people off. We all have a moral purpose in government to try to do something.

As we have heard, this is an area in which there can be a great deal of co-operation between Her Majesty’s Government and Scotland in relation to programmes down south and what we are trying to do here. We can learn from one another and I welcome the cabinet secretary’s comments in that respect. We look forward to learning more from him about the innovative approaches to funding that he intends to pursue in the area of rehabilitation.

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